It’s hard to say that this announcement is any kind of surprise, especially given the plummeting stock price of Google and the rest of the market it only makes sense that certain “experiments” would end up being canned. Google is shutting down their virtual world known as Lively. It is one of those sort of obvious announcements that seemed destined to be made almost as soon as the software was announced back in July.

When this launched originally, it wasn’t really a competitor to Second Life as much as it was just a graphical chat room client that created an interesting 3-D world for you to chat inside. I never really understood why people would want to be there chatting in a little virtual world, but then again companies like Sony are working hard to create what amounts to the exact same thing so clearly we haven’t seen the last of these fancy chat rooms. What I think we can all take away from this is that a chat room is still a chat room and putting fancy avatars inside it doesn’t make it any more interesting. People still just want to chat. Last time I checked there were about 1 million different ways you could do that on the Internet so adding one more chat client to the pile seems like kind of the waste.

Nice try Google but it again to the day I think it makes more sense to make a game be a game and a chat client via chat client and don’t try and blur the line unless the game meets chat or the chat needs a game. better luck next time Google.